India peaked substantially lower than North America or the European Union, and was barely higher than South America at the time. Yet it quickly reversed its trend, which I completely did not expect. If you think you could have predicted most or all of those last two graphs, I don’t believe you. If you can explain most of it in hindsight, that’s still a super hard problem.
I am on record getting India wrong by underestimating the power of the control system.
I am also on record as dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as ignorably unlikely[1]. I wasn’t familiar with the term “Gain of Function” research at the time. I assumed (without thinking about it much) that the only people who would deliberately engineer a pandemic would be secret military weapons researchers. The idea that someone might engineer a pandemic overtly with peaceful intentions never crossed my mind.
My internal logic was actually more of a motte-and-bailey. I felt since laboratories were using the same disease present in the wild that there would be little difference between the lab strain and the wild strain. Thus, all that really mattered was how much laboratory research increased human exposure, which I estimated to be small relative to the natural exposure because virologists are a small fraction of the population.
I am on record getting India wrong by underestimating the power of the control system.
I am also on record as dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as ignorably unlikely[1]. I wasn’t familiar with the term “Gain of Function” research at the time. I assumed (without thinking about it much) that the only people who would deliberately engineer a pandemic would be secret military weapons researchers. The idea that someone might engineer a pandemic overtly with peaceful intentions never crossed my mind.
My internal logic was actually more of a motte-and-bailey. I felt since laboratories were using the same disease present in the wild that there would be little difference between the lab strain and the wild strain. Thus, all that really mattered was how much laboratory research increased human exposure, which I estimated to be small relative to the natural exposure because virologists are a small fraction of the population.